The Principle of Mentalism: The All Is Mind Cosmic Truth

Metaphysical Thesis & Epistemological Opening: The Axiom of the Immaterial Cosmos

Challenging the Materialist Hegemony via Objective Idealism

For over three centuries, Western metaphysical orthodoxy has labored under the dogmatic presuppositions of mechanistic physicalism—an ontology postulating that mindless, non-experiential matter constitutes the fundamental substratum of existence. Within this framework, subjective experience is reduced to an accidental, causally inert epiphenomenon secreted by neurological wetware. Yet, physicalism’s chronic incapacity to bridge the explanatory gap or resolve the “hard problem” of consciousness exposes an ontological crisis at its foundation. The assumption that qualitative phenomenal states (qualia) could mechanically precipitate from quantitative spatial arrangements of unconscious mass-energy remains not merely unproven, but logically incoherent.

When the empirical coordinates of reality are stripped of mechanistic reification, the necessity of an ontic paradigm inversion becomes undeniable. Objective idealism resolves this deadlock by recognizing that consciousness is not an emergent byproduct of matter, but the primary ontological primitive from which all empirical manifestations derive. The universe is not an assembly of self-subsistent material objects situated within a passive geometric void. Rather, spatiality, temporality, and energy are qualitative modulations occurring within a unitary, unbounded field of awareness. In this framework, the cosmos is an informational, psychophysical projection whose fundamental metrics are phenomenological rather than physicalist.

The Core Axiom: ‘THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental’

The foundational architecture of Hermetic philosophy rests upon a single, non-negotiable premise: “THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.” Formally codified as the first hermetic principle within the canonical lineage, this axiom asserts that the universe does not merely contain thought, nor is it merely shaped by mental agency; it is mentation in its totality. The formulation of the principle of mentalism the all is mind universe is mental kybalion provides an operational syntax for deciphering both cosmological mechanics and individual conscious experience.

This doctrine must not be misconstrued as subjective fantasy or solipsistic illusionism. When Hermeticism declares that reality is an immaterial mental cosmos, it posits an objective transpersonal architecture. Phenomenal reality possesses structural continuity, rigorous mathematical consistency, and resistance to individual human volition because it is maintained by the supreme cognitive architecture of the cosmic intellect. Physical laws—gravitation, thermodynamics, electromagnetism—represent the stable habits of an infinite consciousness rather than the immutable constraints of dead mechanism. To exist as a localized sentient entity is to operate as an embedded, recursive participant living within the mind of the all.

Epistemic Demarcation: Solipsism vs. Pan-Noetic Trans-Subjectivity

A rigorous metaphysical investigation requires clear epistemic boundaries to prevent mentalism from devolving into either vulgar solipsism or new-age psychologism. Solipsism commits a fatal category error: it conflates the localized, contingent human ego (ahamkara / persona) with the infinite absolute (To Pan). The solipsist falsely presumes that because sensory phenomena exist only as mental representations, the immediate waking consciousness of the localized observer must be the solitary author and ground of all being.

[ Vulgar Solipsism ]                     [ Pan-Noetic Mentalism ]
  Personal Ego (Finite Subject)                 THE ALL (Infinite Mind / Nous)
               │                                                │
       Projects & Engenders                       Emanates & Sustains All Nodes
               │                                                │
   [ Total Phenomenal Reality ]                ┌────────────────┴────────────────┐
                                               ▼                                 ▼
                                      [ Localized Subjects ]            [ Objective World ]
                                      (Dissociated Observers)           (Collective Matrix)

In sharp contrast, Hermetic pan-noetic trans-subjectivity establishes that the universe is mental, but trans-individual. The localized observer does not fabricate the physical matrix ex nihilo; rather, both the human observer and the objective environment are co-arising, localized crystallizations sustained by the same transpersonal source. The physical world retains functional objectivity for every embodied subject because it is anchored in the supreme cognitive stability of Nous. Establishing this demarcation guards the metaphysical investigator against psychological inflation while validating trans-dimensional metaphysics: anomalous phenomena, altered states of consciousness, and direct theurgic interactions are not arbitrary hallucinations, but localized modulations of a universally distributed informational field.

Primary Codices & Historical Transmission: From Alexandria to the Kybalion

Alexandrian Foundations: The Poimandres and Mens Divina

The historical lineage of the Principle of Mentalism did not emerge from 20th-century occult circles; its roots lie in the syncretic crucible of Hellenistic Alexandria during the early centuries of the Common Era. Within this intellectual nexus, Egyptian temple science merged with Platonic idealism, Stoic physics, and Jewish mysticism, yielding the textual corpus attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The foundational codex, the Corpus Hermeticum, preserves an explicit cosmogony predicated entirely on mental manifestation.

In Libellus I, commonly known as the Poimandres (“Shepherd of Men”), the cosmogonic act unfolds not as a physical fabrication (creatio ex nihilo via physical mechanics), but as an auto-cognitive illumination within the supreme Nous. Poimandres, identifying itself as the “Mind of Sovereignty,” reveals to the visionary Hermes that the cosmos originated when the luminous Word (Logos), an offspring of Nous, separated from the dark, chaotic humid nature. Matter itself is shown to be a precipitated, condensed condition of pre-cosmic mental potentiality.

Similarly, in Libellus XI (Mind unto Hermes), the cosmic intellect instructs Hermes on the absolute omnipresence of mind. The text systematically disabuses Hermes of the illusion of spatial limitation, demonstrating that the entire manifested cosmos is held, conceived, and sustained within the interiority of the divine intellect:

This passage dismantles naive local realism. The human mind can comprehend the cosmos precisely because both the observer and the macrocosmic architecture share a single, consubstantial substance: Nous.

Renaissance Hermeticism: Ficino, Bruno, and Cosmic Ensouling

The recovery of the Corpus Hermeticum by Cosimo de’ Medici and its subsequent translation into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1463 dismantled medieval scholasticism and initiated the intellectual revolution of the Renaissance. Ficino’s project re-ensouled the natural order by presenting the cosmos as an organic, living psychic hierarchy linked by sympathies, antipathies, and astrological emanations. Central to this Hermetic-Platonic synthesis was the concept of the Anima Mundi—the World Soul—which mediated between the transcendent archetypal realm of Nous and the sensible realm of physical nature (physis).

Giordano Bruno extended Ficino’s cosmology to its logical, radical conclusion. Rejecting the closed, geocentric universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy, Bruno combined the Principle of Mentalism with Copernican astronomy, asserting that the universe is infinite in extent and populated by an infinity of inhabited worlds. Bruno argued that if the supreme principle is infinite Mind, its externalization cannot be a finite sphere bound by an outer crystalline boundary. For Bruno, space is an unbounded continuum sustained by a singular, omnipresent, intelligent divine substance:

$$\mathcal{U} = \int_{\Omega} \Psi_{\text{Nous}}(\mathbf{r}, t) , d\Omega = \infty$$

Matter was not dead spatial extension (as René Descartes would later claim with his res extensa), but a luminous, plastic expression of the divine mind itself. Bruno paid for this refusal to divide mind from nature at the stake in 1600, marking the historical schism where Western science abandoned the living mental cosmos in favor of a desacralized, mechanistic paradigm.

The Kybalion (1908): William Walker Atkinson and the Modern Esoteric Recension

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the core doctrines of the Hermetica underwent an ideological re-codification through the publication of The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece (1908), authored anonymously by the “Three Initiates.” Modern historical scholarship—championed by esoteric historians such as Wouter J. Hanegraaff—has conclusively identified the primary author of The Kybalion as William Walker Atkinson, a prolific legal mind, occultist, and pioneer of the American New Thought movement.

Critics sometimes dismiss The Kybalion as a late Victorian New Thought pastiche that projects Anglo-American psychological concepts back into antiquity. However, such critiques miss its structural achievement. Atkinson translated classical Graeco-Egyptian ontology into a practical, modern vernacular accessible to industrial society. The Kybalion synthesizes the emanationist metaphysics of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Neoplatonic architecture of Plotinus, and the nascent physics of energy and vibration that preceded quantum mechanics.

Atkinson systematically designated the first hermetic principle as the bedrock upon which all subsequent axioms—Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender—must rest. Without the foundational premise of an immaterial mental cosmos, the secondary principles collapse into mechanical determinism. The explicit axiom, the principle of mentalism the all is mind universe is mental kybalion, reaffirmed for a modern audience that reality’s foundational architecture is not atomic matter moving through dead space, but a transcendent consciousness executing an infinite cycle of cosmic involution and evolution.

Ontological Architecture & Cosmological Models: The Mechanics of Divine Emanation

The Emanational Gradient: From Non-Dual Absolute to Material Physis

Hermetic cosmology rejects the dualistic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing by an external deity) in favor of an emanational continuum. Divine manifestation operates as a graded descent of ontological density:

At the unmanifest summit resides THE ALL—the unconditioned, non-dual, immutable Absolute. Because THE ALL is infinite, it cannot be augmented, diminished, or located within an external medium; there is no “outside” to the infinite. Consequently, any act of creation must occur within its own cognitive field.

This interior projection commences with the hypostasis of Nous (the Divine Intellect), which serves as the universal repository of Platonic forms, archetypal ideations, and foundational mathematical laws—conceptually analogous to the Gnostic pleroma. The archetypes within Nous then differentiate into the Anima Mundi (Universal Psyche), the energetic, dynamic realm of astral forces, formative fields, and temporal sequence.

Finally, through a process of progressive systemic condensation, the vibrational frequency of mentation decelerates, crystallizing into the sensible world of Physis (materiality). Physical matter is not the antithesis of mind, but its densest state—consciousness crystallized into stable, recursive geometric habits. This physical interface is governed functionally by what the ancient Hermeticists termed the Heimarmene (astrological fate/natural law), an operational matrix analogous to the mechanistic structures overseen by the Gnostic demiurge.

Informational Realism: Wheelerian ‘It from Bit’ and Analytic Idealism

This ancient emanational model finds a striking modern parallel in theoretical physics and the contemporary philosophy of mind. Theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler famously posited the concept of “It from Bit,” arguing that every physical entity—every particle, field of force, and spacetime metric itself—is fundamentally informational in origin:

$$I = -\sum_{i} p_i \log_2 p_i \quad \Longrightarrow \quad \text{Spacetime Geometry} \equiv f(I)$$

According to Wheeler, the universe does not consist of physical matter at the base level; rather, it is a participatory information-processing system where physical observables emerge exclusively from binary choices (bits) registered through quantum measurement apparatuses. Reality, at its foundational scale, is immaterial information.

This informational realism receives its metaphysical completion in the contemporary mechanics of analytic idealism formulated by computer scientist and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup. In The Idea of the World (2019), Kastrup demonstrates that positing an objective material world outside of consciousness is an ungrounded theoretical redundancy. Applying parsimony (Occam’s razor), analytic idealism posits that universal consciousness is the sole ontological primitive. Spacetime and the inanimate physical universe represent what a transpersonal mental field looks like from across a dissociative boundary.

Physical matter is the sensory representation—the extrinsic appearance—of cognitive processes occurring within the universal mind. Wheeler’s “bit” is precisely the informational currency of the Hermetic Nous, confirming that empirical reality is the sensory dashboard of an immaterial mental cosmos.

The Macrocosm-Microcosm Reflex: Fractality of Sub-Mental Nodes

The relationship between finite living beings and the infinite absolute is governed by the structural fractality articulated in the Second Hermetic Principle: “As above, so below; as below, so above.” Within the framework of mentalism, individual conscious agents are neither separate material machines nor independent souls adrift in a mechanical expanse. Rather, they are localized dissociative complexes—what analytic idealism describes as “alters”—within the unified cognitive ocean of THE ALL.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
                 THE ALL / Mens Universalis
                 (Continuous Mental Field)
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
         │                                       │
   Dissociative                            Dissociative
     Boundary                                Boundary
         ▼                                       ▼
 ┌───────────────┐                       ┌───────────────┐
 │ Alter Alpha   │                       │ Alter Beta    │
 │ (Human Mind)  │                       │ (Human Mind)  │
 │ Qualitative   │                       │ Qualitative   │
 │ Interiority   │                       │ Interiority   │
 └───────┬───────┘                       └───────┬───────┘
         │ Extrinsic Appearance                  │ Extrinsic Appearance
         ▼ (Via Sense Organs)                    ▼ (Via Sense Organs)
 ┌───────────────┐                       ┌───────────────┐
 │ Physical Body │ <--- Interaction ---> │ Physical Body │
 └───────────────┘   (Phenomenal World)  └───────────────┘

A human being is a localized aperture through which the cosmic intellect experiences its own emanated potentiality under conditions of space, time, and thermodynamic entropy. Just as a human dreamer’s mind can project an entire nocturnal universe—complete with vast landscapes, physical laws, and autonomous characters who appear completely distinct from the dreamer—so too does THE ALL project the waking universe.

Every node living within the mind of the all retains the micro-generative capacities of the macrocosm. The human mind mirrors the divine architecture: our imaginations, discursive thoughts, and emotional dynamics operate as lower-order emanations that structurally mimic the cosmic cosmogony of Nous.

Phenomenological Mechanics & Interdimensional Interaction: Reality as Psychophysical Simulation

The Psychophysical Membrane: Breaking the Cartesian Boundary

The Cartesian bifurcation of reality into res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended spatial substance) established an artificial boundary that has crippled Western science for centuries. Because it bifurcated mind and matter into incompatible ontological classes, physicalist science could never explain how non-physical thoughts could actuate physical nerves, nor how physical pharmaceuticals could alter qualitative consciousness.

Under the Principle of Mentalism, the Cartesian boundary dissolves. There is no ontological barrier separating the mind of an observer from their physical environment; both are instantiated within the same mental continuum. The human body is not an enclosed material engine, but an open psychophysical membrane. Somatic phenomena are the extrinsic appearances of localized cognitive states, just as planetary dynamics are the extrinsic appearances of macrocosmic mentation. When the Cartesian boundary collapses, psychophysical anomalies—psychosomatic transmutations, non-local telepathic coherence, and synchronistic convergences—cease to be violations of natural law. They are recognized instead as localized phase changes within a fluid mental universe.

Valleean Information Systems: NHI as Trans-Dimensional Mental Modulations

This mental ontology provides a framework for analyzing the phenomena of non-human intelligence (NHI), anomalous aerial encounters, and anomalous high strangeness. For decades, standard materialist investigations of these phenomena have run into an impasse by adhering exclusively to the classical Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH)—the naive assumption that all unidentified aerial phenomena must represent nuts-and-bolts propulsion crafts navigating interstellar space via physical traversal.

When an ungrounded mind encounters the axiom “THE ALL is MIND,” it frequently commits an inversion of the principle, reading it as: “My personal human ego is THE ALL.” This is the psychological pathology that infects degraded pop-spirituality and left-hand path solipsism. The initiate must cultivate rigorous discernment: the personal ego (dianoia) is a temporary, contingent node within the divine mentation, not the primary cosmic projector. Deification (theosis) is achieved not by inflating the ego to universal dimensions, but by systematically surrendering its illusions of separation, purifying the personal consciousness so it can serve as a transparent conduit for the sovereign Nous.

Ontic Responsibility: Ethical Implications of a Mental Cosmos

The realization that the cosmos is an immaterial mental construct does not lead to moral nihilism. On the contrary, it imposes a profound standard of ontic responsibility. In a mechanistic universe, thoughts are private, causally isolated interior events that carry no external moral consequences until translated into physical action. One can harbor hatred, malice, or spiritual depravity without affecting the physical universe, so long as those impulses remain unexpressed.

In an immaterial mental cosmos, this privacy is an illusion:

$$\nabla \cdot \mathbf{E}{\text{thought}} \neq 0 \quad \Longrightarrow \quad \oint{\partial V} \mathbf{P}{\text{noetic}} \cdot d\mathbf{A} = \mathcal{Q}{\text{karmic}}$$

Every thought, intention, and emotional valence generates a disturbance within the shared transpersonal field of the Anima Mundi. Thoughts are not static, inert states; they are formative morphogenetic fields that polarize the subjective and collective matrix. Chronic cognitive degradation pollutes the trans-subjective noosphere just as industrial waste pollutes the physical biosphere. The Hermetic practitioner recognizes that ethical rectitude, mental hygiene, and intentional control are functional necessities for reality management. We are relentlessly co-creating the environmental and existential conditions we inhabit; to maintain a disordered mind is to actively sow chaos into the living fabric of the divine intellect.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   THE NOOSPHERIC FABRIC                 │
│         (Dynamic, Trans-Subjective Mental Matrix)      │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
       ▲                                          ▲
       │ Radiates Intent                          │ Radiates Intent
       │ & Morphic Resonance                      │ & Morphic Resonance
┌──────┴────────────────┐                  ┌──────┴────────────────┐
│  Subject A            │                  │  Subject B            │
│  Mental Hygiene: HIGH │                  │  Mental Hygiene: LOW  │
│  Coherent Generation  │                  │  Entropic Generation  │
└───────────────────────┘                  └───────────────────────┘

Human Agency as Theurgic Co-Creation within the Absolute

True human sovereignty is actualized neither through passive fatalism nor through solipsistic reality denial. It is attained through conscious theurgic co-creation within the immutable operational laws of the cosmos. The Kybalion stresses that while the universe is mental, physical laws are functionally immutable from the perspective of our localized incarnate condition. A practitioner cannot simply leap from a precipice and will away gravitation, for gravitation is an established habit of the supreme Nous, far outweighing the localized mental authority of a single human alter.

Hermetic mastery consists of employing higher mental principles to neutralize and overcome lower energetic conditions. One uses the Principle of Polarity to transcend emotional volatility; the Principle of Rhythm to navigate inevitable cyclic downswings; the Principle of Cause and Effect to become a conscious cause rather than an unconscious effect.

By systematically aligning individual volition with the universal trajectory of the cosmos, the human being steps into their intended role: not an accidental biological machine, but a conscious, theurgic co-creator. In this state of active participation, the initiate fulfills the primeval mandate laid down in the Alexandrian Poimandres: the conscious, evolutionary return of the Anthropos to communion with the Divine Intellect, actively sustaining and sanctifying the living cosmos. For those seeking a wider contextualization of these foundational laws, the Hermetic Principles Overview delineates how Mentalism anchors the remaining six cosmic axioms.

Frequently Asked Questions: Ontological, Historical, and Philosophical Inquiries

Does the Principle of Mentalism Imply That Physical Suffering and Evil Are Illusory?

A persistent critique of idealist metaphysics is that reducing matter to mind trivializes physical suffering, disease, and systemic evil, dismissing them as mere “illusions” of the unenlightened mind. Hermetic mentalism makes no such dismissive claim.

While physical matter is an informational projection rather than self-subsistent dead substance, its experiential validity for localized entities within the system is real. The laws governing the lower registers of the mental cosmos—including entropy, cellular decay, and physical pain—are structurally consistent and binding upon incarnate consciousness. Suffering is not an illusory non-entity that can be wished away; it is a systemic condition of existence within a differentiated, spatiotemporal matrix characterized by polarity and evolutionary friction.

Pain functions within the psychophysical membrane as an essential informational feedback loop, indicating systemic disharmony, evolutionary resistance, or entropy. To dismiss pain as “imaginary” is to commit an epistemic category error, conflating the transcendent vantage point of THE ALL with the conditioned perspective of an embedded alter. Evil and suffering represent systemic resistance (privatio boni) within the emanational descent, providing the developmental tension necessary for consciousness to achieve self-knowledge, discernment, and ethical sovereignty.

How Does Hermetic Mentalism Differ from Subjective Idealism (Solipsism)?

Subjective idealism, historically associated with Bishop George Berkeley (at least in its popular mischaracterizations) and solipsism, asserts that esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived by a finite mind. In this view, an object ceases to exist when an individual human eye stops observing it, unless sustained by an ad hoc divine observer.

Hermetic mentalism rejects this ego-centric framing. It does not argue that the universe exists inside your personal mind, but that both you and the universe exist inside the mind of THE ALL (Nous). The material world retains its trans-individual coherence, evolutionary history, and physical consistency because it is held by the macrocosmic intellect. A mountain, a galaxy, or an atom does not vanish when a human observer closes their eyes or ceases to exist, because its existence is sustained within the universal cognitive matrix.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        ONTOLOGICAL DISTINCTION                         │
├───────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┤
│   Subjective Idealism (Solipsism) │    Hermetic Objective Idealism     │
├───────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • World depends on human senses.  │ • World depends on THE ALL (Nous). │
│ • Fragile: ceases without ego.    │ • Robust: persists across aeons.   │
│ • Localized observer is supreme.  │ • Localized observer is an alter.  │
│ • Prone to Luciferian inflation.  │ • Grounded in cosmic hierarchy.    │
└───────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────┘

Hermeticism posits an objective idealism: physical reality is fundamentally mental, but it is an objective mental reality relative to the contingent, localized human observers residing within it.

Is The Kybalion an Authentic Ancient Hermetic Manuscript or Modern Occultism?

Historical and textual scholarship has settled this inquiry conclusively. The Kybalion is not an ancient Graeco-Egyptian codex recovered from archaeological excavations, nor is it a direct transcription of forgotten Ptolemaic temple scrolls. Published in Chicago in 1908 by the Yogi Publication Society, it was written primarily, if not exclusively, by William Walker Atkinson.

Despite its 20th-century American New Thought terminology, The Kybalion remains a brilliant, coherent modern synthesis of core Hermetic concepts. Its underlying doctrines—the emanational descent of the cosmos, the mental nature of all reality, the fractal symmetry between macrocosm and microcosm, and the transmutation of states through contemplative mastery—trace back conceptually to the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, and the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus. It must be read not as an archaeological relic, but as an authentic, living evolution of Western esoteric philosophy.

What Empirical Findings in Modern Quantum Mechanics Align with an Immaterial Mental Cosmos?

The transition of theoretical physics away from classical Newtonian mechanics provides significant empirical support for the premise that the cosmos is an immaterial, informational construct. Several key quantum mechanical milestones systematically contradict physical realism:

1. The Observer Effect and the Measurement Problem: In the Copenhagen interpretation and its modern quantum informational descendants, a physical system remains in an indeterminate linear superposition of states described by a wave function ($\Psi$) until an act of measurement occurs: $$\Psi = \sum_{n} c_n |\psi_n\rangle \quad \xrightarrow{\text{Measurement}} \quad |\psi_{\text{actual}}\rangle$$ Physical metrics (position, momentum, spin) do not exist as well-defined properties prior to observation. Consciousness, or at minimum an informational registration, is required to actualize definitive physical outcomes.

2. Bell’s Theorem and the Destruction of Local Realism: The groundbreaking experimental confirmations of Bell’s Theorem (culminating in the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger) have mathematically and experimentally eliminated “local realism.” Physical reality cannot be simultaneously local (no influences traveling faster than light) and real (particles possessing definite properties independent of observation): $$|E(a, b) - E(a, b’)| + |E(a’, b) + E(a’, b’)| \le 2 \quad \Longrightarrow \quad \text{Violated by Quantum Mechanics}$$ If local realism is false, the universe is non-local—a property native to mental fields, where spatial separation is an operational illusion rather than an insurmountable barrier.

3. Leggett’s Inequality and Non-Local Realism: Further experiments testing Leggett’s inequality have closed the door on a vast class of non-local realist theories as well. As physicist Anton Zeilinger famously remarked, the experimental violation of these inequalities suggests that we must abandon the very concept of objective, physical realism altogether—a conclusion indistinguishable from the first hermetic principle.

4. Quantum Contextuality: The Kochen-Specker theorem and subsequent empirical tests confirm that the properties of a quantum system depend entirely on the context of the measurement apparatus. Reality does not exist “out there” with intrinsic, pre-packaged properties; it reveals itself dynamically, contextually, and informationally in direct relationship with the observer—an exact physical validation of the Hermetic doctrine that reality is a living, participatory mental continuum. :::